Tornado Chasing For Dummies*

*First published in May '03; updated February '08 and May '10*

For those of you who've seen the movie Twister, tornado chasing was dramatized and Hollywoodified (aka, the the unrelated subplot of marital strife between Bill Paxson and Helen Hunt), unless to those who're married and have or are undergoing strife, perhaps they found the two subjects dovetailing nicely together, but I sorta digress.

Tornado season in '10 got an early start, as Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and other locations can attest to. The deaths and devastation underscores why storm researchers 'chase' storms: by expanding their knowledge of tornado dynamics, they hope to better determine and detect tornadic formation with more lead time, increasing the amount of warning to those in a pending storm's path. Few people who live where tornadoes 'eat' and thrive, can't appreciate all the warning they can get.

Professional storm chasers are just that: men and women with schooling and experience in meteorology and thunderstorm dynamics, equipped and trained to analyze changing weather conditions within a nearby storm cell, and know pretty much what's about to go tornadic or not. They are trained to minimize the dangers to themselves and to the public during their 'chases'; they have a storm chaser's code of conduct, time-tested and safety-oriented. And they have a thrill of the hunt, Helen or otherwise.

They also -- or at least some of them -- tend to grit their teeth and loath six-fingered novices who shouldn't try this from home. Like me.

Growing up in South Dakota and Iowa my first 13 years, I developed a fascination with tornadoes. I've been through a couple; I've seen, from a distance and in the aftermath, what tornadoes up to an F-5 can do. To quote Dusty from Twister, "it's awesome". I spent many a summer back then, tracking severe storms based on TV weather reports and warnings, using a worn road map and a ruler to see if we were in the path or not. I got pretty good at judging what might hit our neck of the woods, and about when.

Then we moved to Colorado, and I learned that the mountains threw my old conventional meteorlogic right out the window, along with my ability to 'sense' the local weather. However, I also learned that Colorado had it's own version of "Tornado Alley": along most of the Front Range, and eastward from Denver to the Kansas/Nebraska borders. As time went on, I saw ample evidence of tornadic productivity in the local skies, usually in June. The tornadoes here tend to be a bit less "awesome" than their leviathan cousins of the Great Plains and Southeast; but that didn't obviate the thrill for me, or the desire of obtaining a photo of one in action. And not a photo taken by a trained, experienced professional: one taken by me.

My goal: an F-2 or better, on a parallel course, at a distance of a mile, maybe less. Didn't want much, did I?

But time and persistence provided just the kind of opportunities I sought. In the very productives summers of 1989 and 1990, I managed to get three sets of tornado shots in and around the Denver Metro Area, one series at the point-blank range of one mile (see the above photo), as it formed and touched down (with the extra point landing somewhere on the Kansas/CO border).

What would come as no surprise to the professionals, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted more.

In July of 1995, three consecutive days that I had off proved tornado-rich; my success proved less, though I didn't miss a couple opportunities by much, and found that I had run heedlessly into more than one situation that was borderline to going really bad in a hurry, without paying much mind to a storm chaser's credo "be aware of your surroundings and changing conditions", or some such. I just plowed right in, seeking the beast in its lair.

In retrospect, I can see where I was lucky to come out unscathed on a couple of occasions. And it did give me cause to concoct a sort-of definitive how NOT to chase tornadoes list. Unless, of course, you're me:

1. First, you need a brain stem disconnect to totally divorce common sense and personal safety from your mind.

2. Second, you need expendable equipment, so that if you guess really wrong, you're not terribly concerned about what just got turned to tornadic hash.

3. Third, while it's helpful to know meteorologic terms and concepts that are second nature to professional storm chasers, it might slow one down when charging boldly where no rational person would otherwise go. For instance, it doesn't matter if that dark, sinister cloud formation approaching you is a wall cloud or one of the more technical terms, a stratavarius or cumulonumbnuts cloud; it just matters if it produces what it is you seek. Especially if you turn out to be right, and are in the worst possible place to be proven so (as I almost was outside of Limon, CO, in June of '05, among other opportunities).

4. Fourth, though there is plenty to the addage of there being "safety in numbers", if you're gonna storm chase my way, you really need to go it alone; if you get an equally untrained, unthinking accomplice with you, the 'two negatives results in a positive" factor tends to take over. Sooner or later, one of you gets a brain signal that suggests "dude, this is really stupid", and you'll get out of there, perhaps even in time.

Granted, a second person could be useful -- to read the map, watch the skies, and add to the totally unnecessary verbal observations taking place during a pre-disaster:

"Oh wow, dude, we have stuff flying around!"

"You dumb sh**, we are the stuff flying around!"

"This is so wrong, man..."

Finally, the ultimate objective in this little idjit escapade -- besides possibly backdooring yourself into a Darwin Award -- is to get your subject in a good quality photo, without becoming the "hey, look at that moron" secondary subject in someone else's good quality photo or video.

Will I do it again? Since this was originally published, I have. My thirst for that 'perfect photo' remains unquenched. But, just so's the least lucid of you won't ponder following me potentially into Nature's version of a really windy toilet swirly, here's a few serious and worthwhile links to visit for some excellent information on tornadoes and chasing them from the safety of your home computer:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/

http://www.skywarn.org/

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/

http://www.coloradostormchaser.com/ (website of Colorado-based storm chaser/photographer Eric Treece)

http://www.twistersisters.com/bios.htm (website of Minnesota-based storm chasing duo The Twister Sisters)

* aka, me